Wal-Mart Bluffs Amazon (But Not Me)

Oh, those shrewd game theoreticians in Bentonville, Arkansas. Speaking at AMD’s Global Vision Conference, Wal-mart’s chief marketing officer bluffed that the company doesn’t care about Amazon, calling it and its $10-billion in revenue “meaningless” against mighty Wal-Mart and its $300-billion in sales. Given that online account for a tiny 1% of Wal-Mart’s sales, he argued that it was basically a marketing expense for the super-retailer..

Clever. What better way to convince investors that a) Wal-Mart isn’t interested in Amazon, and b) that Amazon is irrelevant, than for Wal-Mart to declare Amazon irrelevant and unimportant. So … yes, I’m still predicting Wal-Mart is going to buy Amazon — what better way to grow their online presence quickly? — but those Wal-Mart guys are shrewder game theorists than I thought.